my thoughts on science

One of my friends (Dom Cram) has just had a paper come out in Functional Ecology. It's a really well designed experimental study looking at the effects of dominance and effort on oxidative stress in white-browed sparrow-weavers. His research found that dominant females, who work the hardest to provision young during the breeding season, suffered a large decline in antioxidant protection over the course of the breeding season. Antioxidants are the compounds that health professionals keep going gaga over in various 'super-foods', as they help to reduce free radicals which build up due to the cells natural processes and can damage DNA and thus potentially make individuals vulnerable to ageing and lots of other nasty things. So the study hints that individuals that work hard could be at risk of increased ageing and a variety of other future problems. The abstract and link are pasted at the end of the blog.

Dom has rightly received a fair amount of media attention for this piece of work, and rightly so. This is important, as the public need to know what their taxes are funding and how this work fits into our broader understanding of the world. He was even interviewed on BBC radio:

Above is the reporting from the Times, and this again is pretty good, even has the correct species pictured (and a lovely comic). But if you read the scanned image below you'll see that some one else at the same news paper decided not only to get the species wrong but to link it massively to humans, a gross overstatement, but then also to Bertrand Russell, Francois Hollande and John Maynard Keynes. This is a prime example of awful reporting and exaggeration from what is a well respected newspaper, this is what lay people read and where the get their information. We need better reporting by people who actually understand science, so that the public is better educated and so able to help the government make better science and environmental policy decisions.

Oxidative stress has been proposed as a key mediator of life-history trade-offs, yet the social factors that affect patterns of oxidative status amongst individuals in animal societies remain virtually unexplored.

This is important, as rank-related differences in reproductive effort in many social species have the potential to generate, or indeed arise from, differences in oxidative status across dominance classes.

Here, we examine rank-related variation in oxidative status before and after a lengthy breeding season in a wild cooperatively breeding bird with high reproductive skew, in the semi-arid zone of Southern Africa; the white-browed sparrow weaver (Plocepasser mahali).

After breeding, however, females (who provision young at higher rates than males) suffered elevated oxidative damage, and dominant females (the only birds to lay and incubate eggs, and the primary nestling provisioners) experienced differential declines in antioxidant protection.

While males also showed reduced antioxidant capacity after breeding, this decline was not dependent on rank and not associated with elevated oxidative damage.

Our findings suggest that divisions of labour in animal societies can leave the hardest-working classes differentially exposed to oxidative stress, raising the possibility of hitherto unexplored impacts on health and ageing in social species.